Happy Rainy Day!

Yay!  A rainy day for the first day of autumn!  This afternoon i took the palm tree i live with outside to bask in the glory of the rain for a good soaking; it's been too long, and i've been too lazy to do my friend the courtesy more often—but not today!  Today is for the trees!

Yay rain!

harborside, Wellfleet, MA

my father died early this morning, my mother by his side.  she says he went easily in the end and without struggle; the pause between his breaths became longer and longer, and finally he just stopped.

we visited him last night, my brother and i, as he lay on a reclined bed with a transparent oxygen mask over his mouth, each breath a little closer to his last.  my mother's elder daughter was there too, making each of our paths a little easier and providing what comforts she could; it was she who called to tell me this morning.

from my stereo now comes the sounds of Sting's 'Soul Cages' album, which he wrote after the death of his own father.  i haven't listened to the whole album in years, perhaps anticipating this day.  borrowed emotional vehicles.  'Why Should I Cry For You' and i cry.

my father and i spent a lot of time together, episodically, over the last twenty years (after i was reborn after my darkest time), and he helped me to a second try at life.  he drove (and flew) many times, many hours to see me and spend time together; and we visited many places we wished to see.  the winter coast of North Carolina.  outer Cape Cod at all seasons.  driving from Phoenix to San Diego.  a train ride from Flagstaff to Boston.  a trip to Britain with his sons.  more places, more times than i can count.

bye, Dad.  safe journeys.

the album starts over again.

Great Island in Wellfleet, MA 2

Great Island in Wellfleet, MA 1

Casey Anthony trial — let it go!

Apparently there wasn't any real evidence against Casey Anthony of foul play in the death of her daughter Caylee.  Perhaps the daughter drowned.  Perhaps Casey freaked out.  Perhaps the extended family was so dysfunctional that she (or they) decided to cover up the death instead of just calling 911; but there was no evidence one way or the other.
---Me, i was a lifeguard for some years and have seen my share of drowning deaths (though fortunately none while i was on duty).  People die; it's part of life.  We have to move on.
---IMHO, court cases should be private and not made media circuses; it's not reality television.  Get over it, people — there was insufficient evidence for a conviction.  That's the difference between "the truth" and the legal truth.  Move along.

cool as a 酔っぱらい cat

nervous as a kitten

heh, feeling nervous as a kitten at a bulldog convention.  have been emailing with a professor at Tufts about going there to continue my work in computational consciousness, and it always makes me a little giddy to consult with high-powered profs.  like asking someone out on a date (which i've almost never done).

now i just have to get the nerve up to jump back into the academic thing (and pay for it).  ugh.  oh well, i'm not doing anything else . . . .

chicken soup and the gods

i've spent the last couple of hours making chicken soup from a chicken carcass, and i've maybe begun to understand why some people act so proudly of their chicken (or turkey) soup.

being a god involves (among other things) taking inert matter—dirt or dust, for all intents & purposes—and making a living being from it:  a bird, for instance.

making soup, on the other hand, involves taking a cooked (and therefore deceased) bird and slowly & carefully pulling it apart, bit by bit, until all that's left is . . . well, not quite just dirt or dust, but nasty enough that the soup-maker is ready to toss the lot into the trash with no hesitation.  and while pulling the bird carcass apart (and learning more than anyone ever really wanted to know about all the little meaty bits & connective tissues & miscellaneous bony bits), the soup-maker has "created" a pot of delicious (if you like that sort of thing) homemade chicken (or turkey or whatever) soup.

so of course they're going to feel somewhat god-like in the process and be proud of their creation (and expect anyone else who happens to partake of it to give proper thanks).

making soup has given me a little sympathy for the gods, who (understandably) want some praise for their creations, after all the messy work they did.

so have a little sympathy for the soup-makers and for the gods.

and enjoy!

pessimism briefly in the lead

surprise, surprise:  the WHO finally got the cojones to admit that placing a microwave transceiver — a cell phone, for instance — next to your brain for ten years might well give you brain cancer.  (as if the years of anecdotes from neurosurgeons about finding cancers right near the cell user's ear of choice weren't enough.)

and sadly, it's probably not the Gen X crowd most at risk; it's kids growing up with cell phones glued to their ears.  so they and we will finally switch to using wired ear-pieces and keep the carcinogenic phone in a less sensitive spot (and not near our crotches, i'd hope), climb back into the automobiles robbing us of cardiovascular health, and drive to our jobs sitting in front of computer screens.

at least the toxic CRT screen is mostly a thing of the past.  be thankful for small advances.  :-)

The "Path To Prosperity" — Just Say No!

Don't be fooled!

They're Back . . .

Hooray!  The Sox are back in town (and being broadcast on NESN), and Jerry Remy is back announcing after a bout of pneumonia; so no more of me hating Fox or ESPN for their pro-Yankees slant.  I suppose i should be more understanding of those (subconsciously) wishing they could live in Red Sox Nation but are (for whatever reasons) unable to make the border-crossing — of course they're going to be hostile and preoccupied with the hapless Yankees.

Yesterday i watched 'Fever Pitch' for the first time, and it brought a real smile to my face.  Made me think of my ex- and her ex- (who was a major Red Sox fanatic).

Enjoy the rain, peeps.

Don't Get A Fox Network Lobotomy — Just Turn The Volume To Zero

Wow, i could not have underestimated how monumentally bad the Fox Network coverage would be of tonight's Red Sox at Yankees game.  The announcers are two duds whose names don't even appear on the Fox website (which is too bad, because i gladly would have named them).  They just go on and on about nothing; it's like they forget that there's actually a game going on.  And then to make matters worse, they have Sarah Silverman make a cameo as a supposedly famous Red Sox fan; only she has even less to say about the Red Sox than the dud announcers (and apparently knows nothing about anything, except how to appear mentally deficient; maybe they drugged her).

And since the Fox Network headquarters is in New York City, it's no surprise that their coverage of the game would be pro-Yankees.  But what makes their announcers seem so severely obtunded?  Perhaps it's the continuous low grade gamma radiation present in the city combined with the repeated inbreeding of Fox employees that leads to neural degradation.  Or perhaps it's that their health insurance offers radical frontal lobotomies with a zero co-pay — New Yorkers are loathe to pass up a bargain.

Do Your Bit for the US Postal Service!

We all get junk mail, right?  Of course.  But instead of tossing it in the trash (or recycling it), take out those postage-paid return envelopes and send them back — the Post Office will appreciate the business!

Either send them back empty (boring) or enclose some interesting paper tidbit of your own.  After all, the junk mail company went to the trouble of providing you with a little surprise in the mail; why not surprise them back?

Keep the Post Office in business.  If junk mailers want to pay for prepaid return envelopes, they must want you to send them back no matter what the contents; let them sponsor some re-investment in our Postal Services.

Ciao!

happy birthday to me!

C₂H₅OH at Not Your Average Joe's — Blue Moon (Belgian-style) weiss beer — plus Rosemary Skewered Scallops:  happy birthday to me!  whoo!

(plus plus peanut butter thing joe’s claim to fame – peanut butter and chocolate chunks folded into vanilla ice cream and rolled in oreo cookie crumbs, topped with fresh whipped cream and drizzled with hot chocolate and caramel sauces tableside — YUM!)


now the Sox game; Minnesota at Boston.  very mellow.

35 (base 12) years old.

Donald Trump is Democratic Party's Best Friend

heh, what an interview the Donald had with ABC's George Stephanopoulos!

when George continued to question the foolishness of the Birther issue, Donald (Duck) Trump accused George of having been "co-opted" by "Obama and his minions" — co-opted by Obama and his minions!

LOL!

i think that the Donald is secretly trying to derail the Republican cause; first the hilarious comb-over, and now this!  Go, Donald — bring down the Republicans!  hahahaha!

------------------[Caption:  Republicans, you're FIRED!]

lyrics revelation

A cooling system
Burns out in the Ukraine
Trees and umbrellas
Protect us from the new rain
Armies of engineers
To analyze the soil
The food we contemplate
The water that we boil
---
i just had a lyrics revelation.  (or at least my guess at it.)  Paul Simon's song "Can't Run, But" from his 1990 RHYTHM OF THE SAINTS album refers (in part) to the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster.  i just got it.

heh, i've got to pay better attention and not let this stuff slip by!
---
[Rhythm of the Saints, "Can't Run But" © 1990, Paul Simon]

Hello, Summer!

OK, so it's not really summer; but after that winter, it is to me.  Opening the windows, prepping the fans, bicycling to the store with ease, and — most of all — being able to wear shorts again.  (Although maybe i should wear shorts year round, just with tights during the winter.  Hmmmm....)

And . . . the DSM32 Ultimate VA Collection is up and running; it's like having my own personal radio station with all of my favorite songs and a very generous sprinkling of pop stuff from the '50s, '60s, '70s, '80s, '90s, & '00s:

Billy Joel - New York State of Mind; Led Zeppelin - All My Love; Gordon Lightfoot - For Lovin' Me; The Cranberries - Pretty; John Denver - Take Me Home, Country Roads; Bill Haley And His Comets - See You Later Alligator; Little Richard - Jenny Jenny; Bee Gees - Stayin' Alive; Santana - Evil Ways; . . . (to name a few that just played).

Well, at least i'm ready for summer, if a little early.  :-D

Enjoy!

Bye-Bye "Tea Party"

All right, newly elected "Tea Party" Congresspeople, U.S. citizens can now see what you really stand for:  inflexible "morality" and unwillingness to participate in politics (otherwise known as the art of compromise).  You're not actually interested in fiscal policy.  Instead, all you want to do is jam your sadly out-moded values down the throats of U.S. Americans; but we're not swallowing.

At least you won't have to worry about getting re-elected; everyone is seeing what a farce you're making of budgetary issues.  Rinse and spit.  And thank you for helping insure a second term for Barack Obama.

Bye-Bye!

Feeling Good about Line Dry

Thank you, Concord Conserves and First Parish for helping motivate me to dry my clothes on a drying rack instead of using the dryer in the basement.  I only do one load of laundry each week, and it's really no problem to set up the rack in my kitchen before i go to bed and hang up a washer-full of clothes — and it makes me feel so good!

[here's a link:]
http://www.concordconserves.org/art-action-line-dry-your-clothes

ugh . . .

i definitely need some friends.  i was going to say "new friends", but i don't really have any old friends to replace with new ones.  i guess it's what happens when you get married and divorced:  you lose contact with your friends to accomplish the former; and because of the latter, people are more hesitant to become friends with you in the first place.

at least i still have Star Treks and Ally McBeal and X-Files, even if i've seen Friends too many times and Seinfeld is too depressing.  and someone at church to commiserate with about what wanks my neighbors are (and thank god there's no God at my church, either!).  lol.  :-D

there's still hope.

Deviloid is terrible compared to PureTnA! BOYCOTT Deviloid!

heh, i've got to chuckle at how childish & silly the sysops are at Deviloid (a site which has recently gained in popularity after the downfall of the legendary PureTnA).  at PureTnA, users had to maintain a mere 0.30 upload to download ratio; at Deviloid, the power-hungry kids running the show demand a 0.90 ratio, plus they're crazy with trying to enforce ultra-conformist torrent naming standards and a new video-preview requirement for video clips (and banning the violators).

i mean, sure, the internet is all about downloading nude photographs & videos — but let's not get all anal retentive about it!  i say boycott Deviloid; there are plenty of other places for nudity.

:-D

Rats! the new version of iTunes lets me down

Waiting for me on my computer this morning was a notification that there was an Apple iTunes 10.2 update available.  I click on install and was given the usual License Agreement text to agree to; usually i don't read these too closely, but this time i looked—only one thing really stuck out:

THE APPLE SOFTWARE IS NOT INTENDED FOR USE IN THE OPERATION OF NUCLEAR FACILITIES, AIRCRAFT NAVIGATION OR COMMUNICATION SYSTEMS, AIR TRAFFIC CONTROL SYSTEMS, LIFE SUPPORT MACHINES OR OTHER EQUIPMENT IN WHICH THE FAILURE OF THE APPLE SOFTWARE COULD LEAD TO DEATH, PERSONAL INJURY, OR SEVERE PHYSICAL OR ENVIRONMENTAL DAMAGE.

Damn it all to hell!  All my plans to continue running my secret fission reactor, my air traffic control business, and independent hospital ICU with iTunes are foiled!  I thought that was what iTunes was supposed to be used for!

All this stuff with music, isn't that just a side gimmick?  Maybe i should have stuck with the old version—it's been handling all the air traffic of Acton International Airport, plus a roomful of coma patients on ventilators.  Oh well, maybe Apple will bring those features back in the next version.

Citizens For Better Spam Copy

Why do pop-up ads on websites start off "THIS IS NOT A JOKE!!!  YOU ARE A WINNER!!  CLICK HERE FOR...!"

I thought a joke was supposed to be something like:
Q:  How many hipsters does it take to change a lightbulb?
A:  It's a really obscure number, you probably haven't heard of it.

Why don't the pop-up ads start off "THIS IS NOT A SCAM!!!"???   Why don't they?

Who's afraid of a joke?  Nobody.  People are wary of scams, not jokes.

I think there should be some stimulus money spent on educating those writing spam and pop-up ad copy, so as to annoy the rest of us less.  :-)

people

even though sometimes i miss people, mostly i'm glad to be alone.  people can be mean.  i like being by myself; i almost always know what to expect from myself.  i rock.  and i hope that you rock too.

fear

sometimes i have strong feelings of déjà vu, and they scare me a little.  some of the fear is that i'm about to have a seizure—it's one of the signs i've come to recognize as preceding neural difficulties in my own peculiar brain.  but a scarier (in a way) possibility is that my life is indeed a closed loop, and that i'm simply playing out a portion of it again.

i just hung up my bicycle from a hook i'd just screwed into an exposed beam in my kitchen, and i had a feeling of déjà vu.  now i know that i haven't ever hung up my bicycle in this apartment before; i used to hang it up in the basement of the townhouse i lived in before, but it was a completely different-feeling scenario.

am i about to have a seizure?  probably not.  is my life a closed loop?  i sure hope not.  maybe i'm just jumpy from watching Ally McBeal again and missing the way my life felt in the late '90s.  who knows.

maybe i'm beginning to move on, and it has me a little unsettled.

Ender's QOTD 2011-02-02 -- yay, Ender!

e sort fait les parents, la choix fait les amis.
{ Fate chooses our relatives, we choose our friends }
{ Chance makes our parents, but choice makes our friends }
-- Jacques Delille, in Malheur at Piti (1803), Canto I

God gave us our relatives; thank God we can choose our friends.
-- Ethel Watts Mumford

A good friend is my nearest relation.
-- Thomas Fuller

One loyal friend is worth ten thousand relatives.
-- Euripides

Friends are relatives you make for yourself.
-- Eustache Deschamps

[from Ender's QOTD 2011-01-29:]

The most beautiful discovery true friends make is that they can grow separately without growing apart.
-- Elisabeth Foley
... (also attr. Katherine Mansfield)

---

[and true friends are so hard to come by.  wish i had some near me now.]

drinking coffee

camped out at Acton Starbuck's; am so much happier here than at Sweet Bites (and even somewhat happier than at Savoury Lane).  like Sweet Bites, you get free coffee refills (w/a registered card); but unlike, the service is friendly, the music lively, and the atmosphere sunny; and most of all, you don't get glared at (or cursed out) for merely drinking coffee.  the deal at Savoury Lane is pretty nice too, but you do have to pay a bit more for the coffee (i.e., no free refills); the bonus is that it's fifty-yard-walk away instead of an icy mile down Rt 111 on my bicycle.

but today it's sunny & bright out, so i made the trip.  tomorrow it's forecast to snow again, so i'll go local.

here's to coffee drinking, both corporate and local!  :-D

part of my cultural DNA :-)

just watched the 'Ally McBeal' pilot — wow, that brings me back a million years!  (well, maybe fourteen.)  for the time, it was a hell of a show; even now, it's a lot better than most of what's new on TV.  who cares if i'm just a sucker for Calista Flockhart (and the rest); it's part of my cultural DNA now.

so be it.  on to the next episode.

:-)

shell-shocked

feeling a little shell-shocked.  watched 'Field of Dreams' just now.  haven't seen it in more than twenty years.  probably didn't think much of it then; guess i was more concerned with the woman i went to see it with.  these days my perspective on hearing "the voice" makes the movie seem very sad.  i wish it didn't hurt so much sometimes, life.  feels like i'll be in mourning forever.

mmm . . . massage for a new year

have taken refuge in Savoury Lane (since Sweet Bites is now verboten for me), and the atmosphere here is SO much more peaceful and calm.  the only thing i have to remember is to bring a chair-pad next time.  (and the music is so much better here, too.)

and being at Savoury Lane gets me in the mood to give a good massage to someone.

feels great to be putting out joyful energy into the universe again!

new year

wondering what to resolve for the new year . . .

to be more mindful of choosing to do things which help people and also help the planet.

to spend less time worrying about life and more time living.

to find love again.  (you know what i mean.  :-)

---

what are you thinking about for the new year?